Once again it is time to say goodbye to a weekly column. The Freeport Focus will have two more editions, tomorrow (12/23/08) and then the last one on Tuesday, December 30th. There was a grand plan to create a new daily newspaper, which would have been the first one in the country this year as far as I know. Unfortunately, it was launched at a time when an economic firestorm hit our community and the country. There was not enough time, nor enough resources to give it a full go of at least one year, which would have been the minimum time necessary to become more fully established.
The competition with the other local paper has lead to greater local coverage and improved quality, but the question is now, will it be sustained? I will miss the weekly deadline and trying to stay topical with the columns, but will try to maintain more frequent postings on this site. It is hard to not want to say something about our current state of affairs in Illinois with Blago, et al and what will happen with President-Elect Obama and the new administration. Our world is so ripe with potential stories that it makes the fingers itch to write about them.
Looking at the state of newspapers, though, makes it easy to understand how it would be difficult to have a new start-up for a newspaper. The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News are cutting back to three days per week and two days per week, respectively. An online presence is a must if there is to be local news disseminated to the public. The ones that will suffer the most will primarily be the geriatric population that relies on the daily paper in print form. Eventually, most people will be online and this will become almost the only source of news in a print format. The news will most likely go the way of The Christian Science Monitor with a daily online edition and a weekly newsmagazine edition.
Welcome to the internet age of news ...
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